I.
The quintessence of "humanitarian intervention" has rarely been
displayed so completely than in a recent post by Hullabaloo contributor
David Atkins: "The bloody work of hairless monkeys."
Much
like Martin Amis -- who at some point in the early 21st century
realized that Joe Stalin was one bad hombre and then wrote a book
informing the world of this revelation -- Atkins has apparently just now
discovered that human tribes and religious groups have been senselessly
killing each other for, like, forever. Not only that: Atkins has also
uncovered the hitherto unsuspected notion that "people everywhere are
essentially hairless monkeys whose basic dispositions haven't evolved
that much despite our larger brains and capacity for more moral decision
making."
To recap, then, Atkins asserts that human beings are nothing more than beasts driven by primal instincts to band together in vicious in-groups and savagely attack any outsiders whom they perceive as a threat -- or even for no good reason at all. This is a most grim and gruesome vision of our common human fate, our existential reality. We are "stupid," "morally insane" hairless monkeys doomed to intractable violent conflict. Caught in a trap, can't walk out, as that venerable existentialist E.A. Presley once put it.
Or are we? Perhaps not. For despite the fact that we are all unevolved hairless monkeys with a basic disposition to make up reasons to kill each other, it seems that there is at least one avenue of escape from our inherent nature, one way out of the eternal cycle of violent conflict. Guess what it is.
Military intervention.
I kid you not. After postulating that hairless monkeys cannot overcome their propensity for in-group/out-group violence, Atkins then proclaims that we need to form -- wait for it -- an incredibly powerful in-group capable of inflicting irresistible violence on any out-group that opposes the will of the in-group. Nation-states, and their hairless monkey populations, cannot be "left to their own devices," he says...
"Minimization of war and human suffering will depend on tightly binding people and civilizations to one another, and on taking a dim view of the in-groups and out-groups that people use to separate themselves from one another. And that in turn will require a stronger multinational peacekeeping force, not a weaker one."
So we must "tightly bind" people together -- by force. We must
enforce the unity of all humankind at gunpoint (and bombpoint and
dronepoint). A "multinational force" is required -- is the only
way -- to minimize the suffering from human conflict. And this
multinational force must be so strong that it can oversway -- defeat,
destroy, crush, humiliate -- the military forces of all nation-states
and all other human monkey groupings outside the in-group behind the
"stronger multinational peacekeeping force."
Unfortunately,
having given us the answer to the age-old problem of human conflict,
Atkins suddenly gets a bit coy on a key point. He doesn't address the
question of who will control this all-powerful multinational
force, which will require trillions of dollars and millions of soldiers
to "tightly bind" the world together. Who will staff it, fund it, arm
it, supply it, command its operations? Who will decide who commands it?
Who will decide when it must be used to punish a recalcitrant tribe?
And
these questions lead to another pertinent point: Surely whoever is in
charge of this armed leviathan -- capable of bending whole nations,
whole civilizations to its dominion -- will, in the end, be nothing more
than a bunch of inherently violent, morally insane hairless monkeys
themselves, won't they? Won't this in-group behave just as senselessly
and stupidly as all the others?
Or can it be that Atkins believes that there are perhaps a few hairless monkeys out there who have evolved
a bit further than the rest? And that perhaps these higher beings could
be trusted to use an implacably powerful global war machine only for
the greater good of the lesser breeds, only to "tightly bind" the
insufficiently evolved masses and reduce their suffering? And might
these wise guides be known as "humanitarian interventionists"?
II.
Atkins was prompted to write his piece by the sectarian violence that erupted
across Iraq this week. The slaughter of Shi'ite worshippers is indeed
an instance of our human propensity for senseless killing. But from this
current event, he leaps immediately to instances from history, from all
over the world, to further illustrate this propensity. The effect of
this sudden leap is that the events in Iraq get lost in the general
historical flood -- just one more piece of flotsam drifting by in the
bloody current. Its context is lost, subsumed in general assertions
about our intractable nature. Why did these Iraqi slaughters happen?
There was no cause -- just our stupid violent monkey nature. Atrocities
just ... happen.
Atkins says that when he read of Iraqi
slaughter, he was reminded of the sack of Magdeburg during the European
religious wars of the 17th century. That's a bit odd. The first thing I
thought of when I read about the Iraqi slaughters was something a
little nearer to us in history: the "humanitarian intervention" by
American-led military forces into Iraq in 2003. It was the intervention
of this "multinational peacekeeping force" that directly and explicitly
created the conditions for the recent slaughters that so disturbed
Atkins and made him think about the Holy Roman Empire, and then a story
he heard one time in a college anthropology class about Amazonian
tribes, and also about the "bloody and brutal" culture of the "native
Hawaiian kingdoms."
Atkins seems keen to move on from Iraq as
soon as possible and dissolve its true context in this vague
anthro-philosophical goo. His anxiety on the subject is understandable.
For of course Iraq is the great scandal of our earnest "humanitarian
interventionists." It is the unfortunate outlier, the stumbling-block
that gives holy (sorry, humanitarian) war a bad name. For the fact --
the incontrovertible, historical fact -- is that modern Iraq never
suffered from the atrocious level of sectarian violence that we see
there today -- until the intervention of the "Coalition of the Willing"
plunged the country into death, fear, ruin and chaos. The mass-murdering
intervention not only fertilized the ground for the rise of sectarian
violence; its Anglo-American leaders funded and armed and empowered several of the violent extremist groups directly.
The
sickening violence in Iraq this week did not spring from the
intractable nature of hairless monkeys blindly following their unevolved
hormonal surges. It didn't spring from Amazonian tribesmen killing a
boy who was not their kinsmen. It didn't spring from the bloody and
brutal culture of the native Hawaiian kingdoms. It didn't spring from
Imperial Field Marshal Gottfried Heinrich Graf zu Pappenheim and the
other hairless monkeys who plundered Magdeburg in 1631. It springs --
directly and unmistakably -- from the intervention of the multinational
force that invaded the country in 2003 and then continued to kill,
destroy, corrupt, and foment extremism there for many years afterwards.
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